Getting under the Skin of the Brand - Week 2

The first part of my second week was spent continuing to get "under the skin" of the brand by surfing the net looking at news articles, marketing inteligence and websites. That would shed some light on the current PESTEL issues affecting clients business, and also identifiying and discovering ‘Golden Nuggets’ - important insights which are regularly emailed to the client to show the team understands the issues affecting Barclays business and their brand positioning.

After a while getting "under the skin of the brand", did get a bit tedious. But I knew it was important to continue marching on and putting 110% effort into the task, because once things sped up I knew I wouldn’t get the chance again. A thing, I realised at this stage was my marketing degree had not really prepared me as much as I thought it would for working in advertising, in relation to readily understanding the creative and production aspects of brand management.

This was an interesting revelation as for a long time whilst being a student I ofthen questioned why our degree was titled Marketing and Business? And why If I wished, I couldn't do a straight Marketing degree? However, the first two weeks working in advertising demonstrated that to be a good Account Handler (Brand Manager) you need to have an equally good understanding of both 'Marketing' and 'Business'. Because essentially an Account Handler is the middle-man between the client and creatives; and as a result the job invariable involves having one foot in the world of business (Barclays) and the other in the creative world (advertising agency), basically you are the ‘eyes and ears’ of the client within the agency, therefore, you need to understand their mission and objectives in order to deliver a good marketing campaign.

Midway, through the week, things started picking up, and I began learning more about the advertising agency’s processes and procedures. What was really interesting - was that week; it so happened the agency was changing its creative and financial processes – by placing a stronger focus on being more internally integrated as an agency (i.e. all departments working together). In order to reflect it’s commitment to being a fully integrated digital advertising agency to all stakeholders both internal and external. This was communicated by the new agency wide flexible project delivery process of: Imagine, Discover, Craft, Create and Learn in a presentation.

I attended the presentation of the new process to clients and wrote the contact report afterwards which I circulated to all meeting attendees. In terms of procedures, I started to learn about how to financially manage the creative elements of a campaign in relation to developing and updating cost estimates, forecasts and timing plans. These tasks drew heavily on my Excel skills. I also discovered that many of the procedures in place are there to effectively manage and monitor each stage of the production process e.g. studio time, artwork development and copy writing.

I was also given the responsibility of updating the weekly status report which is presented to the client at the Weekly Status meeting; which the team regularly attends at the client's Headquarters in Canary Wharf to update the client face-to-face on the campaign’s progress.

Date: 7th February 2011